There is chatter everywhere -- mostly speculative and unsourced -- about the Wall Street Journal potentially flipping WSJ.com to a free model, a possibility that Rupert Murdoch was described as calling "a wash" financially.

As newspapers work to improve their search experience and embrace Web search as well as on-site search, they're being exploited by a new round of automated blog spam that displays Internet drug listings right on the newspapers' websites.

This allows unscrupulous scammers to present their pitch under the "trusted information provider" brand of the newspaper. And it undoubtedly undermines the newspaper's brand.

Tribune Company and McClatchy sites in particular are being targeted. [Update: nytimes.com also is being exploited.]

While reading coverage of the Minneapolis bridge collapse this morning, I was reminded how, on the Internet, all the world's media resources are just one click away, which is a boon for consumers but creates a difficult environment for producers, who now have to compete with everything at once.

AP's youth-focused ASAP service is shutting down in October, E&P reports. As a tool for AP to discover how to tell stories in the 21st century, it made perfect sense. As a business proposition, I could never see a way for it to succeed.

ASAP has two parts. One is content intended for print, delivered to member newspapers. The other is an online hosted service with audio and video components.

Fortune has a piece on the challenges facing the newspaper business that asks: "Can newspaper publishers turn the Internet from a threat into an opportunity ...? It's a long shot, but it's their only hope. Their plight is something not often seen in business: Newspapers remain important institutions, providing a valuable public service, but their business model is slowly, or maybe not so slowly, going away."